My laboratory is working to develop new antibiotics for the treatment of infectious diseases in patients in the community and in hospitals. To do this researchers in my laboratory have devised the first practical laboratory synthetic route to the tetracycline antibiotics, which has enabled literally thousands of new antibiotic candidates to be prepared and evaluated for antibacterial activity, many of these with activity against strains resistant to tetracyclines and many other known antibiotics. In our research we seek to continue to develop innovative new chemistry that will make available many thousands more antibiotic candidates, substances that would be otherwise unavailable.